and sub-tropical regions easily grow.  Using this as a base, he was accustomed to sally forth against the Spaniards frequently and in unexpected directions.  His raids were usually successful.  It was relatively easy for him, with a handful of followers, to dash out of the mountain fastnesses, cross the Apurimac River either by swimming or on primitive rafts, and reach the great road between Cuzco and Lima, the principal highway of Peru.  Officials and merchants whose business led them over this route found it extremely precarious.  Manco cheered his followers by making them realize that in these raids they were taking sweet revenge on the Spaniards for what they had done to Peru.  It is interesting to note that Cieza de Leon justifies Manco in his attitude, for the Spaniards had indeed “seized his inheritance, forcing him to leave his native land, and to live in banishment.”

Manco’s success in securing such a place of refuge, and in using it as a base from which he could frequently annoy his enemies, led many of the Orejones of Cuzco to follow him.  The Inca chiefs were called Orejones, “big ears,” by the Spaniards because the lobes of their ears had been enlarged artificially to receive the great gold earrings which they were fond of wearing.  Three years after Manco’s retirement to the wilds of Uilcapampa there was born in Cuzco in the year 1539, Garcilasso Inca de la Vega, the son of an Inca princess and one of the conquistadores.  As a small child Garcilasso heard of the activities of his royal relative.  He left Peru as a boy and spent the rest of his life in Spain.  After forty years in Europe he wrote, partly from memory, his “Royal Commentaries,” an account of the country of his Indian ancestors.  Of the Inca Manco, of whom he must frequently have heard uncomplimentary reports as a child, he speaks apologetically.  He says:  “In the time of Manco Inca, several robberies were committed on the road by his subjects; but still they had that respect for the Spanish Merchants that they let them go free and never pillaged them of their wares and merchandise, which were in no manner useful to them; howsoever they robbed the Indians of their cattle [llamas and alpacas], bred in the countrey ....  The Inca lived in the Mountains, which afforded no tame Cattel; and only produced Tigers and Lions and Serpents of twenty-five and thirty feet long, with other venomous insects.” (I am quoting from Sir Paul Rycaut’s translation, published in London in 1688.) Garcilasso says Manco’s soldiers took only “such food as they found in the hands of the Indians; which the Inca did usually call his own,” saying, “That he who was Master of that whole Empire might lawfully challenge such a proportion thereof as was convenient to supply his necessary and natural support”—­a reasonable apology; and yet personally I doubt whether Manco spared the Spanish merchants and failed to pillage them of their “wares and merchandise.”  As will be seen later, we found in Manco’s palace